


and us like two infinite mirrors

by tamsinb



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: 12x100, Constrained Writing, F/F, Identity Issues/Alteration, POV Second Person, i started this during the holidays and it's still cold so maybe we can all just pretend?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29587896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tamsinb/pseuds/tamsinb
Summary: You joined the Crabs and they saw nothing in you but what you offered and still you remained aloof.And now they are gone. In their absence you wonder what they saw when they looked at you.(12 scenes of 100 words each about Sutton Dreamy, Rivers Rosa, a holiday spent alone together, and who you are when you're left behind.)
Relationships: Sutton Dreamy & The Baltimore Crabs, Sutton Dreamy/Rivers Rosa
Comments: 3
Kudos: 19





	and us like two infinite mirrors

**Author's Note:**

> format borrowed lovingly from lewis attilio, on medium as @pigeonize

* * *

**1.**

“You’re like a dream.”

The first person to ever love you told you that.

You were their perfection.

And then you were discarded and you were loved by another and you found yourself their perfection.

“Like a dream.” Again.

And you pressed your mind and held the two dreams you’d been side by side and the dreams you were didn’t resemble each other in the slightest.

For a while you flitted like scattered hypnagogic thoughts, sensing in others the dream they’d like you to be.

And when alone you would miss each person you were when someone else was around.

**2.**

“Nagomi. Hello.”

“Oh, Dreamy. How goes your time on the mainland?”

“Well. I have been staying in the old townhouse. Loser’s.”

“I see.”

Phone static.

“It is the holidays soon. None of the current roster is here but. I was hoping alumni such as ourselves could-”

“Ah. I wasn’t at too many of those, you know.”

“Yes.”

“I had been planning to spend the holidays in Hawai’i.”

“I understand.”

Further calls to Montgomery, Valentine, Winnie, Holden, and the rest. All similar answers.

Tillman’s name is at the end of your mental list. You decide against calling. What would it accomplish?

**3.**

Fleeting thoughts from others would make you at turns boisterous and effusive, at others encouraging and chipper. Sometimes mean and sarcastic.

You became once and only once a thing with which you were disgusted when it left you. After that you maintained your distance from others with careful metric. You would be who you were and let none imprint their ideals on you.

You joined the Crabs and they saw nothing in you but what you offered and still you remained aloof.

And now they are gone. In their absence you wonder what they saw when they looked at you.

**4.**

Rivers Rosa sits on the couch, in fulfillment of the Crabs’ time-honored plus-one policy. The couch was meant for groups, not a couple, and she cannot fill it though she tries admirably. Her normal fair on TV: cooking shows, this time seasonally appropriate. With each heckle she shouts your heart lifts.

You love her.

And you fear for what that means.

You check yourself over daily, running mental inventory.

If you were changing to suit her you would hope to realize and distance yourself.

But you know.

You know beyond certainty that if you were changed you would not realize.

**5.**

You make your way over to the couch from the wall-mounted kitchen phone. As you pass through space you pass through memories lingering in space like ghosts of yourself haunting you.

This counter you leaned against holding redcupped drink. A fridge you searched through for the freezer cake you were convinced you’d left thawing there. The aperture between rooms you’d rushed through to see if there were any of them left.

The couch that held Rivers. Correction: holds. You return to present tense when she holds your hand.

She smiles and you glean nothing that her eyes do not confess.

**6.**

Her voice comes out as ever: confident and assured, strong, a clarion.

You wish you could make your voice sound like hers but it streams out flatly as ever.

“What should we eat.”

“Show make you hungry?”

“Perhaps.”

“Well. Seeing as neither of us can cook.”

“Yes.”

“Probably order. It’s not the  _ ‘big’ _ holiday yet so it should be fine.”

“Order…”

Shrug. “Wings?”

“Is that holiday food.”

“Hell no.”

“Works for me. What do they taste like.”

It all tastes like food to you. Rivers thinks. “Like yelling and arguing friends. Like a drink meant to be spilled.”

“Oh. Perfect.”

**7.**

Rivers Rosa in profile. Curly hair tied back too high to obstruct vision. You don’t know what stirs in you but you know you want to keep gazing, maybe you deserve such things as your hand squall-line storm-surge glides onto her thigh. She notices which you realize in hindsight may have been the point.

And normally you’re taller, just a bit, but you’re slouched down and she’s a bit above you, using the leverage to part her head heronlike town towards yours, planting a kiss square on your forehead. She retreats, smirking like she’s won.

Which, of course, she has.

**8.**

At some point it started snowing. You would not have noticed but for a stray flicker caught against the wall in the glow of a porch light. In the backyard you can see its cloaking inches, nestling across a lawn you’re relieved to not be able to see in disrepair. Remnants of the last time you were all here, game before their last. Deck chairs, one upright one upturned. A grill still open, more like a birdbath now. Places left open where the Crabs would have gathered, though you cannot remember where you slotted in.

You shudder and turn away.

**9.**

And the negative space in the room feels uncomfortable to you now as if it were filled with bristles and fabric wire. You don’t know if you squirm, or if your face shifts though you  _ doubt _ it, and yet still Rivers notices and looks at you and-

You wish you could like it when she looked at you this way but it feels like an imposition, like she’s waiting for something you don’t think you can offer. In her face nothing of what you can read in others. No force, yet adamant.

Insistent in its non-insistence. You break eye contact.

**10.**

“I only knew who I was when they were here. Now that they’re gone I feel like I left with them.” You give up. “I don’t know why you won’t tell me who I need to be. Who can I be for you, Rivers?”

Rivers places a hand on your shoulder. Looks hard at you. Then softens into a grin and you must have some core because you feel that stare impact somewhere inside you.

“I want  _ you, _ Dreamy. Exactly as you are. I love the you that’s you and you love me and that’s all I could ever need.”

**11.**

Rivers leans against your hair and is supported and it feels like two magnets refusing to touch. Your hair shines with light from a nebula three parsecs away and it looks like tears.

And whatever the name of the feeling in your chest is you know it must be yours.

You see around the room photos and keepsakes and remnants of memories. Nicks in walls from roughhousing and the badminton set Kennedy found at a yard sale and never used.

And like a dream of the future, or the past, the whole team is there, scattered and sitting with you.

**12.**

You look around the room and see the Crabs, your family, and they may be miles above you but you will reach them, or they will return, and you know someday you will be together again.

You know this because you can see around you the proof that they were alive. Even as you see this you know that it's unnecessary, because you yourself are that living proof.

Through a dream you see them all back again, an endless succession of past selves fading away as you see those you love.

You feel blessed to be only your own dream.


End file.
